I am a girl from the faraway lost land of Tibet. I ran with my parents, older brother and my small baby brother resting in my mom’s warm womb in search of freedom and a better life. I am a girl who struggled to find her own identity especially after knowing my birth country is now a place that cannot be reached or seen. In search of independence and better opportunity, I came to America with very limited English but with great hope. I also carried the blessings of my grandparents from Tibet and the memories of my loved ones from Nepal and India throughout the journey.

My feet landed in this foreign land of liberty in 2006. It took me years to realize that life in New York was no crystal staircase, that there weren’t trees and leaves made of money, nor was there the easy independence that my fellow Tibetans and I had been searching for. I struggled every morning to wake up because I wasn’t use to the timing, then I would try to get on the yellow bus on time. I made sure my brother and I sat on the front seats, so the other students might not make fun of us. We looked different from them.

For an immigrant like me, whose mom was jobless for three years due to her lack of English, and whose dad worked in a Sushi store for eight years, constantly fearful of not being able to support my two brothers and me, the United States was more struggle than freedom. My life turned 180 degrees. At the age of thirteen, I realized I had to step up and contribute to my family financially, and I’ve been working ever since.

Mitt Romney’s line on “self-deportation” got a laugh from the audience at a Florida debate last week, but as thousands in Alabama, Arizona and elsewhere know — there’s nothing funny about it. Self-deportation is Romney’s euphemism of choice for an enforcement strategy that attempts to make daily life intolerable for undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., turning the routine aspects of each day — attending school, driving a car, paying utility bills — into sites of monitoring, fear and profound suffering.
And that’s the story NPR’s This American Life set out to tell last weekend with their feature on the attrition through enforcement strategy’s poster policy: Alabama’s HB 56. Reporter Jack Hitt speaks with families, community members, small business owners and local politicians as they struggle with the far-reaching consequences of the new law. Some of what you hear — such as Republican State Senator Gerald Dial’s remorse over signing the bill — might surprise you.
The media blitz and non-stop punditry about immigration can often obscure the basic facts about laws like Alabama’s HB 56: they hurt people. Real people. Every day. That’s why it’s critical that we continue to tell the stories that we do — because self-deportation can’t be a punch line when there are real lives at stake. via twitter →